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Creamed Vegetables
All the vegetables mentioned in the preceding time-table, except tomatoes, summer and winter squash, may be creamed. Large vegetables, such as parsnips, turnips, and the like should be diced, then added to Cream or White Sauce No. 2 -once the recipe for the sauce being sufficient for from two to two and one-half cupfuls of the prepared vegetable. String beans should be cut in inch lengths, cabbage should be coarsely shredded, asparagus may be left in the form of tips, or be cut in inch lengths, spinach should be chopped fine, and onions should be left whole. If desired, a little celery salt or dusting of minced parsley may be added by way of seasoning. The vegetables should be allowed to stand in the white sauce for at least ten minutes, to become thoroughly heated.
This is a master method rather than a single dish: cook the vegetable, fold it into a medium white sauce, and let it sit long enough to heat through. Two things need translating — what "White Sauce No. 2" means, and how far to cook the vegetables first.
- White Sauce No. 2In books of this era numbered white sauces generally run thin to thick, and No. 2 is usually the medium one; a typical medium sauce is about 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. The exact proportions are in the sauce recipe this page cross-refers to, not here. If the book is a shortening promotion, the fat intended may be the shortening rather than butter; butter gives a better flavour and behaves much the same in the roux.
- ProportionOne quantity of the sauce recipe to 2–2½ cups of prepared vegetable, which is what the text specifies. That is a fairly generous coating; if you want the vegetables merely glossed rather than napped, stretch it to about 3 cups of vegetable per batch of sauce.
- The vegetables go in cookedThe 'preceding time-table' the text refers to is a chart of cooking times. Nothing is cooked in the sauce here — the vegetables are already tender, and the ten minutes' standing is only to bring everything to serving heat. Undercooked parsnip or turnip will stay hard no matter how long it sits.
- Ten minutes standingHold it over very low heat or in a double boiler, covered. A flour-thickened sauce sitting on direct heat will scorch on the bottom and skin over on top; stir once or twice and keep it below a simmer.
- Why tomatoes and squash are excludedThe book does not say, but the likely reason is that both throw off enough liquid to thin the sauce, and tomato acid will curdle milk. Spinach is borderline for the same reason — squeeze the chopped spinach hard before it goes in.
- Whole onionsPresumably small boiling onions, peeled and cooked whole, since the text says to leave them whole. Trim the root end without cutting into it so the layers hold together, and drain them well; wet onions dilute the sauce.
- SeasoningThe sauce needs salt, and a good grating of nutmeg is traditional with creamed onions and spinach. Celery salt and parsley are the book's suggestions; white pepper keeps the sauce from looking speckled if that matters to you.
- YieldA cup of sauce with 2½ cups of vegetable serves four as a side dish. Leftovers thicken hard in the refrigerator and want a splash of milk when reheated.
Creamed vegetables belong to the age when a competent cook was expected to know three or four white sauces by number and build dozens of dishes from them — a habit of mind inherited from French kitchen training and taught in the American cooking schools of the late nineteenth century. The Snowdrift books were promotional cookery published for a brand of cottonseed-oil shortening made in the American South, and their purpose was to show that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard anywhere a recipe called for them, including in a roux. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the cotton crop, and its conversion into a solid, shelf-stable cooking fat in the early twentieth century changed what was in ordinary pantries; recipe booklets like this one were how the change was sold. The master-recipe format — one sauce, a table of boiling times, and a paragraph explaining how to cut each vegetable — is also a good record of how the books expected vegetables to be handled: boiled, then dressed.